Hi, everybody. This is Gatsad. A couple of days ago, I visited an orthopedic surgeon for my knee,

and it turns out that the gentleman in question is someone that I had gotten to know in summer of

1995, we met when we were both vacationing in Cuba. He was traveling with a friend of his, and I was also on

vacation there. He was a young guy, 19 years old, I think maybe first year university, maybe not even.

And so I remember him very well from those days, but then we hadn't kept in touch,

although the friend with whom he was traveling, I had stayed in touch with a bit more, and he

had even become a research assistant of mine for a bit. And it turns out that my wife went to high school with him, so they knew each other.

So we met up, I mean, he was just the absolute loveliest guy you could imagine.

It kind of gave me renewed hope that not all physicians are just these narcissistic, god-complex type of folks. He was polite, professional,

friendly. He explained things. He did give me a very big shot of cortisone in my knee. But what I

want to talk about today is briefly the fact that at one point we were chatting and I said to him, you know, I'm always interested in knowing why people go and, you know, make the life choices that they make and I've, you know, why is it that one person studies this particular medical specialty versus another? And then I continued chatting and I said,

you know, you look at, for example, psychiatry, well, the standard joke is that a psychiatrist

has never cured a patient. And so I wonder how they feel in terms of their purpose and meaning

because they never absolutely know whether they've

helped someone. On the other hand, in your case, this is me speaking to the orthopedic surgeon,

friend of mine, said in your case, someone comes in, they have a ruptured Achilles tendon,

you fix it and their lives are better for it. So you must score very highly on sort of life satisfaction,

life satisfaction, at least when it comes to sort of your professional responsibilities. And he said,

and he answered me something that, you know, was actually quite revealing. He said, actually,

the top three surgeries that provide the greatest amount of post-surgery

kind of life quality satisfaction are, I think number one, he said, were hip surgery replacement.

Number two was cataracts, which is something that Sir Harold Ridley pioneered, and I discuss him briefly in my forthcoming book, Suharsal Empathy, which you should go out and pre-order right away.

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